Austrian immigrants Dr. Egon Neustadt and his wife Hildegard were among the earliest collectors of works by famed American artist Louis C. Tiffany (1848-1933) and they played a critical role in reviving interest in Tiffany’s lamps in the mid-twentieth century. In 1935, newly married and living in Flushing, Queens, the Neustadts purchased their first Tiffany lamp – a small Daffodil, for the incredible price of $12.50 – from a secondhand shop in Greenwich Village. Tiffany’s work was decidedly unfashionable at this time; indeed, Louis C. Tiffany died in 1933 and his Tiffany Studios would declare bankruptcy in 1937. But the Neustadts, undeterred by the current disinterest in Tiffany lamps, were struck by the beauty of the colorful glass and enchanted that the shade had been made by an artist from the beloved country they now called home. Over the course of the next fifty years, their collection grew to include more than 200 lamps of all shapes, sizes, and designs. It remains today the largest and most comprehensive lamp collection ever assembled.

A Passion for Tiffany Lamps highlights the extraordinary scope of the Neustadts’ collection. Examples of Tiffany’s most iconic lamps – the Wisteria and Dragonfly – will be on view, along with unusual lamps produced in limited number, such as the Pond Lily globe and Peacock hanging shade.

In 1995, The Neustadt partnered with the Queens Museum to share its collection with the New York metropolitan area through a permanent Tiffany gallery and educational programming. This partnership has special significance because Tiffany’s glass furnace, bronze foundry, and workshops were located in Corona, Queens, less than two miles from the Museum.

A Passion for Tiffany Lamps is organized by The Neustadt Collection of Tiffany Glass

Luis De Jesus Los Angeles is very pleased to announce HUGO CROSTHWAITE: In Memoriam: Los Angeles, the artist's first museum solo project in Los Angeles, to be presented at the Museum of Social Justice. The exhibition is an official Participating Gallery Exhibition of Pacific Standard Time: LA/LA and is co-presented with the California Historical Society.

In Memoriam: Los Angeles will be presented at the Museum of Social Justice from September 6, 2017 through February 25, 2018. An opening reception will be held on Saturday, October 14, and will be preceded by an artist talk and exhibition walk-through. The exact times for these events will be announced at a later date.

Hugo Crosthwaite will produce In Memoriam: Los Angeles while visitors watch from the sidelines. The mural will wrap the walls of the entire gallery and will be on view in its completed form for only a matter of weeks before Crosthwaite begins the process of painting it out, section by section, during museum hours. This mural-as-performance is part of a series of murals he calls In Memoriam, which the artist has been painting at sites in the U.S. and abroad. Visitors are invited to speak with him, ask questions, or simply watch while he is working.

Crosthwaite works in a style that combines portraiture, comic book characters, ads and signage, urban facades, and mythological references, among other things, in dense and layered compositions. His work reflects the character of frenetic urban settings - especially border towns like Tijuana where the artist lives. Fear, hope, sorrow, and celebration are all represented together as he incorporates his observations of daily life. He elevates the ordinary person to heroic levels showing the trials they endure while surviving and thriving in our contemporary cities. Through his work, Crosthwaite invites us to have compassion for people who struggle in the margins of society.

For In Memoriam: Los Angeles, Crosthwaite will observe and sketch people in the local Los Angeles downtown area as he works in an improvisational manner to complete the mural. Working only during the museum's open hours, he will engage the public and allow the interactions to influence his work. At the end of the exhibition, the artist will produce an animation from still photographs taken throughout the process, which will show the painting's production from beginning to end.

In contextualizing Crosthwaite's work in relation to the Chicano mural movement and the
¡Murales Rebeldes! exhibition at the California Historical Society, the creation of a site-specific mural at the Museum of Social recognizes another important contribution on Olvera Street - “América Tropical,” painted by Mexican muralist David Alfaro Siqueiros in 1932 - and addresses ideas and issues that are at the core of the Mexican-American experience, from family, religion, and popular culture to work, immigration, and equality. “My performance of deconstructing my mural pays homage to the Siqueiros mural - to the fragile permanence of image and memory. I am honored to be working so close to it,” says Hugo Crosthwaite.

The Museum of Social Justice is located in the historic La Plaza United Methodist Church at 146 Paseo de la Plaza, in El Pueblo de Los Angeles, at the intersection of the Los Angeles Plaza and Olvera Street. The museum is a cultural center focused on the story of Los Angeles' diversity through education and community transformation. Current museum hours are: Thursday through Sunday, 10:00 a.m. to 3:00 p.m. Tel. 213-613-1096.

Hugo Crosthwaite was born 1974 in Tijuana and lives in Rosarito, Mexico. He received a BA in Applied Arts in 1997 from San Diego State University. His works are in the permanent collections of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art; Orange County Museum of Art, Newport Beach, CA; Perez Art Museum, Miami, FL; Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego, CA; Museum of Latin American Art, Long Beach, CA; San Diego Museum of Art, CA; Boca Raton Musem of Art, Boca Raton, FL; and, University of Arkansas, Little Rock, among others.

Monica De Cardenas is delighted to announce an exhibition of new work by British painter Chantal Joffe.

Joffe is known for her portraits, painted in a fluid, smooth style, in which she is able to capture the emotions, weaknesses and vitality of human existence. Her subjects are often female: girls, adolescents and women seen in different moments of life.
The artist depicts them with a gaze that is halfway between the immediacy of a snapshot and a situation of emphatic distortion. These studies on the human condition express no judgments, but appear one after the other with great energy and engagement, also thanks to the bold rejection of any formal order. The psychological intensity of the figures makes our very opinion ambiguous, disturbing and gratifying us at the same time.

With influences ranging from Piero della Francesca to Edgar Degas and from Francis Bacon to Alex Katz, Joffe has based her work on a direct and intimate observational relationship between the painter and her sitter. Mostly her subjects are family members and personal friends, sometimes images from historical figures or the mass media. She is also engaged in a series of candid, often searing self-portraits and tender double portraits with her daughter Esme. Whatever their origin, her subjects have the intensity and psychological richness of characters, like instants captured from the lives of literary heroines.

Within this subject area, Joffe experiments widely with form, color, texture and approach. The paintings swing between the poles of forethought and improvisation, as flurries of brushstrokes repeatedly clash and fuse across the canvas’s arena of action. Although drawing is important to her, she never delineates her forms, but rather allows color and shape to merge as a cumulation of her imaginative process. As she told The Independent in 2014: “I paint to think”.

A group of new pastels is collectively titled ‘Family Pictures’. Joffe has described the mesmeric and physical, arm-straining experience of their making, the thickly applied chalk accumulating with a dusty, luminous purity. There is a sense of democratic, mobile immediacy about these sticks of pigment, the looser strokes they occasion turning clothes, or the stripes of a beach hut, towards abstraction even as they retain the sense of gesture and place of their making. Here again, experience and artistic form, emotional connection and representation, are suspended in lively, irresolvable association on Joffe’s picture plane, which accommodates all manner of psychological and spatio-temporal complexities.

Born in 1969, Chantal Joffe lives and works in London. She holds an MA from the Royal College of Art and was awarded the Royal Academy Woollaston Prize in 2006. Joffe has exhibited internationally at the National Museum of Iceland, Reykjavík (2016); National Portrait Gallery, London (2015); Jewish Museum, New York (2015, solo); Jerwood Gallery, Hastings (2015, solo); Collezione Maramotti, Reggio Emilia, Italy (2014-2015); Saatchi Gallery, London (2013 -2014); Mackintosh Museum, Glasgow (2012); Turner Contemporary, Margate (2011); Neuberger Museum of Art, New York (2009); Royal Academy of Arts, London (2005); Galleri KB, Oslo (2005) and Bloomberg Space, London (2004).

This exhibition is an encounter between a young artist and an ambivalent new space, the combination of Gallery Yang's café and its courtyard.

Nowadays, artistic activities are taking place in almost all art spaces, sometimes not confined by building boundaries. But many spaces are passive when holding exhibitions, with one mission imposed on them, that is, the arrangement and display of artistic works. We often understand a gallery space in terms of its architectural and commercial functions, rarely reminding ourselves that the air invisibly sliding in and out the building is also an intrinsic component of the space.

Gallery Yang's café and its courtyard constitute a “nonstandard” space, since it is so different from many big spaces in terms of spatial elements. Its ecological system is a natural one: a typical urban outdoor climate, four seasons, winds, rains, a café, a reception room, and a restroom. All these elements can be used by a artist and integrated into a work.

Liu Yazhou is an artist who newly graduated and received his master degree from an art college. In this exhibition, for the first time he presents his current artistic thinking and cooperates with a whole space. A new space, a new artist , and a new curator encountered, exchanging not established exhibition experiences but primitive artistic impulses. In unsteadiness always lurks some danger. The elements change, and some works of the exhibition may vanish due to certain natural or unexpected factors. So what is before the eyes of a visitor may not be the completed state of the works. As regards form, the artist abandoned the method of heaping up materials, worked in accordance with the internal mechanism of the artistic creation, and let the visual appearances of the works naturally emerge.

Liu Yazhou's works belong to an important branch of sculpture. It draws on the expressive methods of the Modernism, and integrates the changes of individual thinking in the contemporary art. Thus the concise, precise, restrained individual track of light-vision in this exhibition.

Text by Zhang Yingying

About the Artist
Liu Yazhou was born in Hebei in 1990. He graduated from the Sculpture Department of Sichuan Fine Arts Institute with a bachelor’s degree in art, 2014, and from the Sculpture Department of China Central Academy of Fine Arts with a master’s degree in art, 2017. Now he lives and works in Beijing. His project includes Track/ Lotus (Gallery Yang, Beijing, China, 2017). He has participated in group exhibitions at a number of institutions, including the Beijing Minsheng Art Museum, DS Art Museum, Jinji Lake Art Museum, Today Art Museum, Luo Zhongli Art Museum, Chinese Sculpture Museum, and CAFA Art Museum.

About the Curator
Zhang Yingying is an art observer and independent writer. She is the chief editor of DocumentaKassel, a Wechat public account. She began working as an artist in 2010. Since 2015 she has turned to data collection, artistic review, and a study focusing on Kassel Documenta. From then on, she has kept thinking about the meanings and possibilities of the contemporary art in today's China, and looking after the best meeting point between the changing contemporary art and the evolving social reality.